The No campaign's case against independence is like a giant black hole

For a start, the road to the poll itself contained very few bumps and tortuous twists. The SNP won the first majority at the Scottish Parliament, through a voting system designed to rule out such an outcome. It seemed a matter of hours before then Tory Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to pass an Article 30 agreement paving the way for a vote on independence.

Looking back, it never seemed to occur to anyone to doubt that an SNP majority would lead to a referendum. It had been a key – let’s be honest THE key – SNP policy and the people of Scotland had come out in favour of it. How could the leader of a party routinely rejected at elections in Scotland credibly refuse to listen? By general consensus, that would have been morally untenable.

Fast forward to this week and we have a UK Government minister imposed on a country which returned just six Conservative MPs telling the Scottish people that no matter how many of us vote for independence-supporting parties Westminster will not listen.

Let’s drill down further on the 2019 election figures. The Tories won just 25.1%of the vote – a drop of 3.5%. They lost seven of their 13 seats. There was a swing of 3.5% away from the party. The SNP, on the other hand, enjoyed the support of 45% of voters. The party won 13 more seats to take its total at Westminster to 48 and enjoyed a positive swing of 8.1%. Who is better qualified to speak for Scotland? What on earth gives Boris Johnson and Alister Jack the moral authority to dictate to the Scottish people when they can have a vote on the future of their own country?

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Better Together used plenty of dirty tricks in its referendum campaign … scaring the elderly with lies about pensions; equally false claims about Scotland’s right to use its own currency; threats of an exodus of businesses from the country after independence; and the still unfulfilled promises of the Vow. And, of course, towering over everything, the claim that a No vote was the only guarantee that we would stay in the European Union. We all know how that turned out. And yes, the Unionist side was initially reluctant to actually debate the issue in the forlorn hope that it would go away.

But – eventually – there was a campaign, a televised debate and a massive increase in political engagement in Scotland, much of which persists to this day. However, Unionists today don’t debate independence at all. They simply repeat their two mantras that this is not the time to have another referendum and that the first was a “once-in-a-generation’’ event. There is no intellectual argument put forward to acknowledge the blindingly obvious fact that Brexit has changed the entire basis on which the Better Together campaign was fought. There is no passionate argument in favour of the Union, nor any explanation of why majority support for indyref2 should be simply dismissed. The No case is one big black hole.

There is a brick wall where democratic debate should be, a mindless repetition of meaningless phrases, a refusal to engage even in discussion. Boris Johnson and Alister Jack can’t even be bothered to string more than a sentence together and, worse, think they can get away with avoiding it.

It seems to me unlikely that there will be a cross-party No campaign again this time, although the election of Anas Sarwar as the new Scottish Labour leader makes that more rather than less likely. We have already seen where Sarwar stands, with his swift removal of a Holyrood candidate for having the temerity to suggest the party should respect democracy and support a second referendum at some unspecified time. That support for a vote is shared by many in the Labour Party in Scotland, including Sarwar’s rival for the leadership Monica Lennon. Labour’s candidate in Glasgow’s Kelvin, Hollie Cameron, told the Sunday National last weekend that the only quibble her party had over indyref2 was with the timing. Labour’s Scottish Executive Committee immediately withdrew its endorsement of her candidacy.

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That’s typical of current Unionist attempts to stifle any discussion around independence. But they fact they won’t talk about it doesn’t mean they are not busy campaigning against it. Westminster is busy limiting Holyrood’s ability to spend Scotland’s own money by grabbing extra powers to go over the Scottish Parliament’s head and pay for projects MSPs have not voted for.

And to make things worse they’ll plaster the Union flag over such projects in a doomed bid to make us grateful for seeing our own money being spent by London without a thought given to the priorities our Parliament has democratically decided. This is a blatant bid to roll back and eventually destroy devolution by Tory politicians who know next to nothing about Scotland but are ideologically driven to impose their will on a country intractably opposed to their party’s values.

We have also seen desperate bids to portray SNP internal problems such as the bitter clash between Alex Salmond and the party he once led as potentially fatal to the campaign for independence. I’m not downplaying the significance of that problem or other internal SNP feuds which are ill-timed and senseless. But the party reported a significant rise in membership after Nicola Sturgeon gave evidence to the Holyrood inquiry into the Scottish Government’s handling of allegations against Salmond.

Certainly an attempt by Scotland on Sunday last weekend to claim polling revealed support for independence had fallen below 50% after her appearance spectacularly backfired. The “poll” purported to show the effects of the evidence of both … but used an unusual methodology which ruled out direct comparisons with previous polls and ensured the data had to be published with a disclaimer.

The Savanta ComRes poll did not follow the usual procedure of weighting results with the likelihood of respondents actually voting in a referendum. Had it done so the result could have been radically different. When the same weighting system was applied to a poll by the same company last month it changed a No lead into a majority for Yes. The so-called poll was widely reported as a serious setback for Yes, but the truth was there was no story because the headline findings had been discredited by the polling company itself.

It’s becoming apparent how the No side is campaigning … through fake news, obfuscation, a refusal to debate and by undermining everything Scotland’s Parliament has achieved. The Yes response has to focus on positivity about independence, the defence of our democracy and unity. We have been warned.